Steve Litt wrote:
[...]
What I like about LyX over MS Word is:
1) LyX is rock stable.
2) LyX's native format is humanly readable and parsable.
3) LyX produces beautiful output with minimal tweaking.
4) LyX is free software. No license tracking.
5) LyX is pretty good about version conversion -- probably better than Word.
3) is important. All other word processors _can_ produce beautiful
output. But other word processors lets you screw up much easier. LyX is
based on styles, instead of having them as "options".
Other word processors also force you to do manually what latex does
automatically. I see a lot of word/oo documents, and some faults repeat
all the time:
* Ragged right margins - urgh. This has its uses, but single-column A4
is not one of them. But _everybody_ makes this mistake. Probably
because it is default?
* The section heading as the last item on a page. Other word processors
don't seem to prevent this, it is up to the user instead.
* Lots of little font inconsistencies that are quite hard to create
in LyX. The occational double linefeed.
Errors seen occationally:
* Errors in the TOC. Strange that this is possible at all.
* Bizarre formatting oddities because the user made a formatting
change that the word processor couldn't handle.
Yes - changing the appearance of a style is much easier in other
word processors. But if you actually do that to an existing document,
then you'll see what happens to all the little manual
tweaks you have done. Tweaks the word processors ought to do for
you.
An interesting test: Change the page layout for a 30-page
well-formatted document. Different margins and paper size,
different font size. These things are easily changed in LyX too.
Don't "fix up" anything, just make PDFs after changing. The LyX one
will likely be ok.
Helge Hafting
